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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

Critical Theory: 1 & 2 « Previous | |Next »
December 26, 2004

I'm with Fred Dallmayr on the relationship between the first generation of Critical Theoriests (eg., Adorno and Horkheimer) and the second generation (Habermas). The Dallmayr link is courtesy of Ali Rizvi's excellent Habermersian Reflections.

Dallmayr says that:


" While many members of the first generation were sympathetic to religion (though not to any kind of dogmatism) in the form of a subdued Jewish messianism, the basic initial impulse of the School—as an “Institute of Social Research”—was the critical analysis of late capitalism and bourgeois-liberal society. These tendencies were nearly reversed during the second generation. Under the guidance of Jürgen Habermas, “critical theory” showed little or no interest in religious faith, preferring instead to champion a purely rational discourse (inspired in part by neo-Kantianism and linguistic philosophy). At the same time, again under Habermas’s influence, critical theory has steadily moved closer to political liberalism, to the point that the distinction from Rawlsian proceduralism sometimes appears as a mere nuance. Small wonder that many observers have detected a gulf separating the two generations."

The text being reviewed is Eduardo Mendieta (ed.) Jürgen Habermas, Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity. In it Mendieta argues for a smooth, uninterrupted continuity between the two generations of the Frankfurt School, and that the second generation of the Frankfurt School has “without equivocation” continued the agenda of the first. In response:
Dallmayr says:

"My task here is not to arbitrate between Athens and Jerusalem or to judge the respective merits of rational-philosophical and religious-theological arguments. My point here was simply to cast doubt on Mendieta’s claim of a smooth, uninterrupted continuity between the two generations of the Frankfurt School. This doubt is further reinforced by developments in another arena for which Habermas has shown little sympathy: French philosophy, especially in its deconstructive variant. As it seems to me, many of the motifs of the first generation—appeals to eschatology and a “radically Other”—have resurfaced in recent decades in the writings of French Jewish and Christian thinkers, from Levinas to Derrida and Marion. Habermas’s essays make no reference to Levinas, and his comments on Derrida are almost uniformly dismissive. Have motifs of the first generation thus emigrated from Frankfurt into new terrains?"

I accept that Habermas' turn to, and embrace of, a mode of “functionalism” (inspired by Parsons and Luhmann) and his elaboration of evolutionary models of social and individual developmenta was prompted by a “dissatisfaction” with the first generation’s treatment of rationality, and especially its refusal to take seriously Weber’s thesis of progressive societal “rationalization,” secularization and disenchantment. And I accept that Habermas distinctions “system” and “lifeworld” as dimensions of social life were an improvement on the totally administered soceity.

But Habermas has embraced American political liberalism in a way that Adorno and Horkheimer never did.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 3:27 PM | | Comments (1)
Comments

Comments

And how contemporarily savvy he is. Nobody, but nobody take Habermas seriously. Not only is his philosophy of language deeply, irrovacably flawed, but the man lives in an outmoded, utopian world, of normative-worshipping Republican democracy--a world where the best argument always wins, and where irony and commercials, (let alone anything after modernism!) have never existed.